zombiekillo.blogg.se

I wear her words around my shoulders on my tallit, my sacred prayer shawl.The resulting deduction is then subject to a second limitation equal to 20% of the excess of: You are in the company of a woman whose name we invoke in our prayers and whose life we celebrate. “Where you go, I shall go, and where you lodge, I shall lodge your people shall be my people, and your G-d my G-d and where you die I shall die, and there shall I be buried.” Ruth remarries as prescribed by law at the time, but even when a child is born of that new union, nobody calls it “Ruth’s and Boaz’s child”–they all say a child has been born to Ruth and Naomi. Ruth is considered the first convert, and her vow to her mother-in-law Naomi (after Ruth’s husband’s death) forms the basis of our modern marriage vows. It puts you in the company of Naomi and Ruth. But do you know what our literary tradition does say? If you’re just a person out there loving other people of the same gender as you? The Torah says nothing against you. Once you start taking the rituals and practices of Israel’s contemporaries into account, it suddenly becomes clear why these prohibitions would have been put into place (sex magic was common in the cult of Ba’al, for example, while pederasty was practically a requirement in Greece). Unless you accept a word-for-word literal translation with zero consideration for the social mores and other tribes surrounding Israel contemporary with the writing of Torah, nothing about this commandment has anything to do with our modern understanding of queer people having committed relationships. You’ll notice none of these involve “ew, you disgusting gays.” (So basically: don’t cheat on your wife with a dude, which is probably treated separately from “don’t commit adultery” because adultery would come with the risk of an illegitimate child.) Pederasty (adult male/adolescent male sex) is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a male prostitute is full-stop forbidden, a man sleeping with a man as part of any kind of sex magic or fertility ritual is forbidden.Īnd my rabbi’s personal interpretation, based on the sentence construction: a man shouldn’t sleep with another man in a woman’s bed. Here’s an incomplete list of possibilities: The strange sentence construction suggests that “lie with another man” uses a feminine construction you wouldn’t normally find in a sentence that’s entirely about men, and while “toevah” means “forbidden,” it’s not actually clear what is forbidden. The grammar surrounding “men” in that sentence isn’t correct, and the word I’ve translated as “forbidden” is “toevah,” a word so fucking old we literally don’t know what it meant anymore. The most “accurate” word-for-word translation of that verse would say “a man shall not lie with another man it is forbidden.” We do read Hebrew and we still don’t know shit. They don’t read Hebrew and they don’t know shit.Īnd now here’s something you probably won’t hear from any of those Fine Christian Folks ™ anytime soon, either: You guys know that verse in Leviticus that homophobes like to trot out? Well, I’m here to tell you: Hey, your friendly neighborhood Jew here! You’re all valid, and frankly, if there is a ‘loving God,’ then that God will be happy to see you happy. So why every Joe on the streets thinks they can take one or two verses, completely out of context and probably mis-translated several times to boot, and use it to spout propaganda and hatred for an entire group of people will forever be beyond me. I have a hard time knowing what my grandpa is talking about, when he starts going on about the technology or practices of his youth, and that was only about 80 years ago, in the same country and in the same language as me.

The bible is one long-ass game of telephone, whispered around the world in dozens if not hundreds of languages, for thousands of years. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts.”

Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. “ In researching the world’s oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua’s Jericho is one of the oldest human settlements.

Hell, in Kenneth Davis’s Don’t Know Much About The Bible, there’s a passage that absolutely blows my mind and proves just how much we can misinterpret with simple translation mistakes: It’s content taken out of context and misinterpreted over hundreds of years of translations, re-translations, and mis-translations. The bible doesn’t condemn homosexuality anyway.